I have a few mammoth sunflowers in the yard...and i noticed a some tiny white mothlike insects under the leaves a while back...now these little pests are everywhere..and there are millions of them. it looks like it's snowing around the sunflower sometimes. They don't seem to be harming the plant yet, but i wonder what they are, and if they will eventually kill the sunflowers. Needless to say, i dont like them. a few of them i can handle...but there are just too many. and i dont want to use pesticides because of some birds in the yard who often nibble on the leaves. any advice would be great

thanks

-- D of CA (Muhawi@aol.com), September 14, 2001

Answers

White-flys? Try this sites info:... www.greenharvest.com.au/garden_pests/whitefly.htm

-- bj pepper in C. MS. (pepper.pepper@excite.com), September 14, 2001.

Yep. Sounds like white fly. They will slowly kill the plant. I was a grower in a commercial greenhouse, and I can tell you that they are very hard to get rid of. If you don't want to use chemicals, you can use yellow sticky traps. However, in my experience, they don't work very well. The best solution I have found is to spray the plants with insecticidal soap. You will have to reapply once a week until the eggs have hatched because the soap will only kill the adults. Unfortunately, even this doesn't always work. Then the only thing you can do is get rid of the infected plant. Good luck!

-- Tracy Brock (tbrock@splitrocktel.net), September 15, 2001.